


The Thing About Eames and Arthur

by Prinzenhasserin



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Academia, Backstory, Character Study, Happy Ending, M/M, Oblivious, Pining, Pre-Inception, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-11-18 19:58:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prinzenhasserin/pseuds/Prinzenhasserin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames met Arthur at the Louvre in Paris, when Arthur was seventeen, and looked like twelve.<br/>It's winter 1999 and the PASIV gets invented.<br/>They exchange a few sentences, and don't meet again until two years after.<br/>(Or: why the two most impressive men in the dream sharing business only have eyes for each other.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eames

**Author's Note:**

> It's my first time publishing an Inception fanfiction, and probably the last, because I feel like I'm writing a Marty Stu couple. I can't seem to stop writing them this way. Also, there is practically no action, sexually or otherwise, and they're just so -- brilliant.  
> I subscribe both to the Rocknrolla and the old English money backstory for Eames, having never actually seen the whole Rocknrolla, and not being of old English money, and my Eames tends to alternate between knowing too much and nothing at all about suits.  
> Not beta-ed.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eames mets Arthur at the Louvre in Paris, when Arthur is seventeen, and looks like twelve.  
> It's winter 1999 and the PASIV gets invented.  
> They exchange a few sentences, and don't meet again until two years after.
> 
> (Or: why the two most impressive men in the dream sharing business only have eyes for each other.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's my first time publishing an Inception fanfiction, and probably the last, because I feel like I'm writing a Marty Stu couple. I can't seem to stop writing them this way. Also, there is practically no action, sexually or otherwise, and they're just so -- brilliant.  
> I subscribe both to the Rocknrolla and the old English money backstory for Eames, having never actually seen the whole Rocknrolla, and not being of old English money, and my Eames tends to alternate between knowing too much and nothing at all about suits.  
> Not beta-ed.

There are not a lot of subjects where the whole dream-sharing community is of a single mind. Dreaming doesn't have rules, because the imagination doesn't have rules - instead they have to make do with certain... guidelines.

One is: Working with Dominic Cobb for more than three months makes you an instant expert. Should he take novices on, they're (1) incredibly talented and (2) have been tempered in the training from hell. Working with him more than once? Instant fame.

(Another good one is: Don't ever trust your forgers. That's true only in spirit, but not letter; because sometimes, in certain circumstance you simply have to take a leap of faith. If you have to work with forgers, trust them.)

Then, there are habits, sometimes sensible (i.e. scrambling after a job) and sometimes very much unexplainable – like why the safe route is always the most predictable, and why inception is impossible.

And lastly, there are the common truths, things that happen every single time, are empirically proven to be right and are treated much like the law of gravity in the real world.

Here we go:

  1. A job in Teheran will always be FUBAR. Even if on the outline it is the most boring, straight-forward and safe job. A job you would trust to a baby anywhere else. The mark can be un-militarised, there can be a trusted inside informant, hell, the mark's mother can be with them – doesn't matter, the job will definitely be a mess.

  2. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Or, if you don't know shit, shit happens.

  3. If Arthur doesn't want you to find anything, said object will (1) vanish without a trace, (2) you will end in exactly that prison you won't be able to escape from and (3) you will forget what you were looking for, everything you hold dear, and finally your name.

  4. Whenever someone will mention Arthur in a conversation to Eames, sooner rather than latter there will be the phrase “When have you been working with the stick-in-the-mud?”

  5. And the last, but not least: If you hear rumours about Eames you find likely, they aren't true. If per chance, you hear something utterly inconceivable and generally impossible, it probably happened. 




* * *

The thing is - would you ask Eames who the most impressive man in the dream-sharing business is, he would hands down, completely seriously answer with: “Me, of course!”

Then he would grin the bright sunny smile of the sun in middle Africa and you would shake your head and call him “impossible” or any derivative of that.

Most dream sharers who have been in the business for a while are going to hide their smiles at that and tell the rookies to not listen to yarn being spun. Sound advice, really, but then it's always stupid to forget you are talking to a con-artist, a swindler, and a crook.

(Dream workers were a paranoid bunch. They worked in other people's _minds_. There was a reason why good forgers were about as rare as people retiring alive. To forge you need to know yourself. But the more you live in other people's dreams, the more you get unsure about yourself - which is why you loose your sense of self and are unable to imagine yourself completely different. If you can't be completely different, you loose. You also loose, because forgers are psychological scary and you know exactly why, working among them.)

For Eames the most impressive man within the dreaming community, the one most dream-sharers had nightmares about; the most impressive man in the dreaming community is Arthur.

Arthur, the stick-in-the-mud, Arthur without imagination, Arthur who triple checks his triple-checks.

(Arthur, who can make a kick in zero G; Arthur, who once held the valedictory speech at Stanford, and was born in Hawaii; Arthur, whose weaknesses are his strengths.)

See, the winter of 1999 – when the PASIV is invented, Arthur is living in Paris. Eames is there, too, incidentally: The Last Supper of DaVinci has been put back on display after 22 years of restoration in Milan, and so he sells copies (signed copies, this time legally, very good quality) in Paris. The year 1999 was otherwise a very bleak year for his extracurricular activities. Europol was founded, after pressure from within the EU, the OLAF was founded, too – that year Richard Poivet, Charlotte Perriand and Louis Féraud all died in fall.

Eames would later insist they died out of grief for all the un-painted masterpieces, because so many art students shied away from copying in fear of mad bureaucrats on a warpath. It's untrue of course - nothing could make art students fear, except an increace of prices for their favourite material.

Anyway, Stephen Miles' – then a lowly assistant professor of various subjects – research team of Paris IV (maybe Paris III, Eames could never keep them straight) – developed a dream sharing device. It doesn't make the headlines, because the militaries of the United Nations express a particular interest; but among the circles in-the-know, there are rumours of great money to be made while barely lifting a finger. Working the mind, so to say.

Later, after Eames is introduced to Mallorie Miles, the daughter of the Professor, he is made aware they have been researching lucid dreaming. He's the first to completely change his mannerism and appearance - Forging is born.

Arthur, a seventeen-year old exchange student from University of Pennsylvania, has been a tester (possibly one of the designers as well? Eames had never been able to find out).

He meets Arthur, knowing nothing about the man.

* * *

Afterwards, the account is probably embellished by the master of pretence himself, but this is what probably happened:

Imagine the imposing Palais Royale illuminated by soft lights, the air mild and full of noises, the glass pyramid (affectionately called cloche à fromage by the locals) centred in the middle, on a bench near the rondeau - Arthur is a vision in haute couture, an angel in Paris, a miracle of the pre-Christmas time. He is as usual, looking younger than he is, gaunt like a beanpole and inexplicably cute in his Jean Paul Gaultier three piece suit, with shiny black curls around his slightly pointed ears – Eames is drawn to him. Not sexually, god no! (He did have some standards, back then.)

Eames is sitting in front of the Palais du Louvre and sketching the grand entrance an the pyramid. Arthur is sitting on the next bench over, not wrinkling his haute couture suit at all, a laptop on his knees. (Eames thought that to be very, very ridiculous. A fifteen year old, in a hand-tailored suit and a computer on his knees.) He looks so adorable, Eames simply has to sketch him, too.

Then, the stupid wanker has to stand up. Eames could not let him go, of course, and hurries after him.

“Sit!”, he shouts after the boy, and with a few long strides, he has caught up with his object of fascination. He hauls him backward to the bench and makes him sit. It's easy, because the beanpole doesn't hide any muscles. “Sit down, there's a darling, une moment~”

“What the hell are you doing?”, Arthur replies, and his face is so carefully blank, the con-man in Eames is rejoicing. Also, he pegs the boy as very much older than he looks, corn-fed American and rather uptight. He seems to be prepared to humour strange guys, though, so Eames just continues with his sketch.

“Sketching you, silly,” Eames looks up into blue eyes. They are very blue. “And there's your nose.”

“I have an appointment,” the other man says, after a short pause. “At Paris VIII.” He says Paris huit – like the locals do.

“Oh,” Eames said, and adds shadow. “Do you know about that dream project?”

“That's classified,” the other answers, and Eames could only admire the pitched eye-brow, because it was to fast gone to sketch.

“Yes,” Eames answers and smiles his ₤1.000 smile. “I know people.”

“Sure,” says the boy he had just met with sarcasm that could cut anyone into pieces and bring lesser men to their knees. “Well, I know things." He made a short pause, and continued, "Wanna come take a look?”

Eames stares at the boy he has categorised as uptight, a rule-enforcer, just for a few nanoseconds longer until his mask as a lazy art-student is back in place, but he is simply not able to say no. This was _exciting_. Another one who studies dreams.

The boy didn't dawdle long and brought him directly - (“Arthur, where have you been? We couldn't start without you!”) - into the halls of what would be known as the birthplace of dream-sharing without bating an eye, and without being introduced to each other, dodging the few people on the streets, and giggling like school boys at the couple "frenching" on the bus, Arthur found him Mallorie Miles, the spiritual leader of her father's research group, herself a grade-A research student.

Before he leaves towards some equipment that looked kind of dangerous and lets Eames experiment, Arthur grabbs him and whispers: “The Last Supper copies – I liked them. They weren't - I thought them identical to the original.”

Eames remembers smiling: "Almost, but not quite."

He makes the Europol listing for most wanted art thieves the very next day, and escapes to the colonies (of France, this time).

* * *

He does not see Arthur until three years later, when mobile phones have become more usual. The worldwide web has taken flight. Had he known he wouldn't meet Arthur for so long, he would have used some more impressive words. Maybe quoted Sartre.

Only when they met again, he stops referring to dream-sharing as his Mission From God.

(Because seriously – Arthur had been taking the mystery man a little too far: Everybody believed in his existence, but nobody could say who and where he was.)

* * *

The second time he meets Arthur is in Singapore. Or, more specifically, on Pulau Tekong, an island nearer to the coast of Malaysia than Singapore Airport.

It wasn't a very lucrative job. Instead it was much more personally satisfying, one could even call it petty revenge – they were conning three dream-workers who had been stealing from colleagues (which in principle and generally was nothing bad, only they had let theirself be caught).

Arthur had very short cropped hair, wore a tuxedo jacket under a trench-coat; and when he smiled, you thought of horse heads in your bed and cement shoes on your feet. Possibly of wailing sirens during the world wars.

(Eames almost asks him if he did have a younger brother studying in Paris – but thinks better of it.)

There was something tightly restrained about him, like a taut crossbow, ready to hurl a bolt with a middle speed of 300fps through your ribcage out the otherside, crashing the engine of an airplane and blowing the lot into smitters.

Eames didn't dare speak to him. (Well. To talk about anything not job-related.)

(He was glad, he didn't, two months later, when the curls were curling over the tips of his ears again, and his stance had relaxed ever so slightly. There was also the leather-tie to his probably not bespoke suit (it didn't have additional cuff-links), but anyway, what would Eames know about tailored suits?)

* * *

And so the tale of their acquaintance continued – Arthur, swinging back from hot to cold from friendly to down-right rude. And Eames, who couldn't help his feelings. Each time, he dressed more obnoxious, did more obnoxious things, played a little more Arthur's opposite, because it simply felt... discourteous... incredibly stupid... scary - to kiss the ungrateful sod, sing him to sleep, or make him dinner. Possibly all three.

He was reasonably sure he wouldn't be tortured.

Maybe shot in the knees. (Especially trying the second one. Good God, what was he thinking!?)

It was Singapore, when Arthur became the stick-in-the-mud. It had been too much, seeing him like that, strong and invincible, but looking like the simplest touch would shatter him into ten thousand pieces.

Eames didn't want Arthur in pieces. He wanted him whole and cuddly, and totally unprofessional.

* * *

By the time they revolutionise dream-sharing yet again, Eames has been probably most definitely maybe in love with Arthur for 13 years counting. It's quite depressing, really.

He talks to his sister about Arthur, for goodness sake. (And to his chemist, that one Russian mob boss in Australia, the barmaid of the Talon, the guy in the Tokio underground who accidentally on purpose groped his butt, the flourist in Santa Barbara, the guy in Johannisburg with the outrageous Oxford's - well, you get the idea.)

But no! The idiot follows Cobb around like a love-sick puppy. (Well, maybe it's the other way around, who knew...) And was getting shot at, and stabbed and – Eames has opinions about that. So when Cobb turns up in Mombasa, while he was trying to sell the local drug lord a non-existing diamond mine, he drops his name and job, and joins them on the craziest idea the motherfucker ever had.

(He had tried Inception once, in Teheran. On the wife of Egypt's president. He should have known that just because they did the opposite of normal jobs, it was Teheran, and the job would go south.)

He should also have trusted the rumours – namely that the Cobbs have been in limbo. You don't leave limbo sane. He should have taken one look at Arthur, kidnapped him with a spaceship and eloped with him to Vulcan, but alas, hindsight is 20/20.

It is here where he meets Saito, the man Arthur might have become if he had gone corporate, a centered efficient man, who takes one look at him and told him: “You're in love.”

Eames, the actor, the grifter, the con-artist (the Thief), laughs and winks: “And Mr. Businessman is more in love with his work than his wife and mistress.”

The man has smiled an indecipherable Saito-smile that tells Eames more about Saito than the man is aware of, but less than he is used to getting from people. Saito doesn't seem to be aware of being dissected, but gets a scarily impression of Eames nevertheless.

He was and wasn't surprised when it started to rain in the dream, when Fisher was militarized, when the train with Mal came, when Saito was shot, and they had to rescue their god-damn tourist out of limbo – the job turned into an endurance test for thinking on your feet. The thing he remembered most, though: Arthur had smiled, when he put him to sleep.

And when they arrived in L.A., pumped up with Adrenaline, physically alright and probably no less sane than starting, he watched Arthur. Arthur was wearing one of his gray ensembles (he had changed the tie in the bathroom), had kissed Ariadne in the dream-world (but had told him to go asleep with a fond smile).

Eames watches as he takes the trolley with the heavy PASIV, watches as Arthur leaves in a non-descript yellow cab.

Alone.

(Eames feels exactly like every time Arthur shot himself matter-of-factly in front of him - it doesn't help he sprains his little toe kicking one of the airport bins in frustration. This whole love thing is over-rated, he decides.)

(It doesn't help.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	2. Arthur

Arthur collects information – it's something he trained himself to do. Details are his most valuable commodity, not that he hasn't plenty more to offer. He's the detail's man, yes, and that includes never loosing sight of the bigger picture. In fact, every single fact he collects is carefully insinuated in his plans, and ideas, and projects, to be put to use someday.

Like every other person out there he has his pet projects, about which he probably knows more than anyone. The PASIV is one of them. Mal's children another. The high fashion of Paris, Gründerzeit buildings, non-mendelian genetics... He is a man of many interests, he has always been that way.

It's very painful when he finds out Eames was one of his obsessions without him noticing.

* * *

Arthur is born, for all intents and purposes, when he's eleven years old.

His parents die in a house fire, leaving him in the hospital destitute and an orphan. There, the officials notice his lack of substantial information, not only on his person, but in the whole wide word. Apparently, his parents were technically ghosts -- anti-establishment anti-governmental hippies (or criminals) without any records whatsoever, not even a tiny marriage certificate. There is no trace in the system of him, at all.

Arthur is eleven, can't remember much, if anything, about his mother's work and what she did. Out of what he remembers, they have barely enough to put her name and birth date on his birth certificate. He gets a backdated social security number, but his father stays a mysterious figure who taught him reading, statistics, and the Lord of the Rings mythos.

Later, when he's a teenager and thinks he may come from the British royal line, he searches the databases on the look-out for his parents, but he never gets further than the missing note for Bonnie Darling - which might be debatable for a not-fake name.

He stays in the system (where else would he go), is unreasonably well educated for a back-water, self-educated hippie from Minnesota, and finishes high-school with fifteen.

His background stays suspiciously non-existant.

* * *

Technically, he goes to college for engineering and architechture, because bioengineering has yet to really take off, and anyway, it's probably better he broadens his horizon a bit more legally speaking - he still looks like a pre-schooler, and Lizzie, the only girl in his calculus class says he's probably descended from fairies.

Through Lizzie with whom he shares the otherness of their graduating class, he meets Mal, who's a hot French exchange student. She's at least ten years older than him, and does her thesis on a similar subject at the same time as him. She always takes the book he needs two seconds before he gets there.

She's- brilliant. Enticing. A dangerous butterfly, the calm before the storm, the light on the other end to the tunnel. Arthur cannot help himself.

They bounce ideas of on each other, go to heights of theoretical speculation, and then try proving their as it turns out not so far fetched theories. They must look very interesting, a femme fatale with the reddest lip-stick on the bright lit side of the street and the boy that looks like he could be her son discussing biochemistry in the library, at the pool, outside of bars, on the steps to the subway.

He makes her follow him to Japan to the University of Tokio, studying the effects of sleep on the human mind in relation to other neurosystems. And then follows her home like the love-sick puppy he is not. Because their relationship is full of little facets, but sexuality and romance curiously were left out.

He learns a lot about the dubious depths of not quite legal research, of being and not being underestimated looking like a thirteen-year-old teenager (instead of a sixteen-year-old teenager). Dream-sharing is not quite born yet. His first PASIV is built from scraps of one of the experiments the physicists left after trying to duplicate something of Nicholas Tesla. It looks that way too.

During his stay in Paris, he finds himself firmly integrated into Mal's circle - who has established herself in the artists quarters. She's looking for design options - (“a mishmash of cables might be acceptable to you, Darling, but it's not something I want to look at when I wake up from the most wonderful dreams!”) His penchant for details is firmly appreciated.

He's a quick study, so they teach him on the side how modern paintings differ from the classics.

  
Mal makes him do her homework.

* * *

 

He's fascinated with the Mona Lisa. 

His fascination doesn't correlate to the painting itself. She's ugly, the picture is boring and he doesn't like the brush lines. But why does she touch people all the same? Why is she the most noted mysterious beauty?

It's because he dislikes the hype so much he notices the guy in the suit (it doesn't fit right) selling extremely good forges. Not only does he wear atrocious suits, he flirts with more people in the short time Arthur watches him than a normal Parisian in a week. It's Handsome Bob, Mal tells him as if he would know him then.

No matter.

They need a thief. There's only so much platinum you can borrow until the establishment asks uncomfortable questions.

In the Interpol database Handsome Bob is listed as Eames, art dealer.

* * *

 

The problem with Eames is that he's brilliant. A genius.

But he's – a player. Takes eccentricities, histories, faults, from other people and makes them his, until it's all you notice. It's infuriating to a man like Arthur who needs to understand people, so he can predict what they will do.

He meets him often – the dream business is vastly growing, but the number of professional dreamers of quality is roughly the same. If there is something about Eames he remembers from the last time, it's gone by the time they meet again.

Facts he verified are true, by investing a lot of time, money and energy: He was born in England. His grandmother is a duchess. 3 of his tattoos were made in Honolulu. He's a feminist.

It's not much, seeing as he knows Eames almost seven years.

* * *

 

It's Tel-Aviv where he realizes. It's Tel-Aviv where he notices. It's Tel-Aviv where he wants to phone Mal and tell her he never had to deal with people crushing on him.

Mal laughs and tells him to stop being silly, counts out the girls and boys he all let down easily.

He wants to whine and tell her: "Yes, but they weren't Eames!" He doesn't.

He starts watching Eames more. Strangely, nobody seems to notice.

Arthur doesn't do short cons. Eames never seems to run out of cons to do, marks to befundle, and money to loose.

Eames wears second hand clothes, because his second hand people all wear first hand clothes. Whenever he's stateside he buys Mrs. Butterworth syrup in bulk, and whenever he's in Germany he does the same to Coke. He buys English toffee, Caribbean tobacco, cannoli from Milano, Taiwan soy sauce, Japanese make-up, Egyptian cotton and camel milk from Tunis.

Arthur might fall a little in love with him, when he sees him eat Swedish Keks in Johannesburg. 

Anyway. It's Tel-Aviv in May, and it's hot, hot, hot. 

There doing a job – it's more an intimidation than an extraction, and they're doing it out of a cave in the desert.

It turns out to be a trap. It's not his first, but it's the first in a cave more than 30 miles from civilization. What had he expected, in conflicted domain near the Jordan river.

On the plus side, the mark isn't militarised, the cave is so very much a cave that GPS is about 20% accurate and Arthur and Mirabelle - the chemist - are the only ones on site.

On the negative side? The area is being bombed by someone; they don't have anything but rope and their communication is cut off from the outside.

And then, there's a helicopter on the cave entrance and there is Eames, with a helicopter, he prabably pulled out of his ass, and Mirabelle gets shot and the mark looses his mind. Literally.

There's just no way – Arthur wouldn't have done that for more than a handful of people. Eames came back with a hell of a rescue plan, while their extractor, the one integral to the plan, is chilling in Dubai. Usually jobs don't go this far south.

He thinks he would have done the same for Eames, but he can't fly a kite, nothing to say of a helicopter. It's something he has to remedy, soon.

* * *

 

The thing is, Arthur's quite brilliant.

He also never had a sexual, romantic relationship with someone he trusts. 

It's a conundrum. He wouldn't know how to begin seducing someone who knows him and trusts him. 

Trust is an ambivalent exchange. He doesn't trust himself not to fuck up a relationship with Eames, because the forger trusts him for some inexplicable reason. He can't try something because he distrust himself, with someone who trusts him.

It doesn't make any sense to him anymore, if it had ever, but he's quite sure it's the damned rice-whiskey.

* * *

 

He keeps more tabs on Eames than he did before, because it was him that introduced the forger to dream sharing. He feels responsible.

(There are two others he introduces: Tullia, who's an extractor; and Ferdinand, who's someone else entirely. They're not as attractive.)

When he sees him next, he isn't quite prepared for Eames, and is even more stand-offish than usual. Eames teases him.

Arthur feels like he's meeting Mal all over again. He doesn't like that feeling – it's like he's made out of teenage angst, hormones, nerves and no brain override. He feels, he's getting sloppy, is harsh, unfair and hypercompetent. Ferdinand isn't there, Tullia dropped from the radar months ago, and Mal is busy with Cobb so there is no one to call him out. If Eames isn't going to kill him, any other team member is going to.

* * *

 

Working with Eames gets better with the time. (There is just no way it could have gotten worse.)

He ignores his infatuation. There's that moment in Geneva, when they escape over the lake to the other nation, Arthur is sure Eames going to kiss him.

There is that textbook example in London with Tullia, where he goes pliant, and hopes for the best, but Eames looks heartbreakingly beautiful and he looses his determination. He invites him for drinks instead. Somehow Tullia comes along.

There's that job in Norusk, mob business, where Eames finds him in a hole in the wall pub drinking vodka, looking like a Russian prince, and dragging along trouble like usual.

It's terrible.

* * *

 

Arthur thinks he must slowly go insane. For some inexplicable reason, he has agreed to do inception, Inception, with Cobb who has a shade that likes to stab Arthur where it hurts; Ariadne, who never designed dreams before but on paper; Yusuf, who's a genius and nice, which is why he's hard to trust (and because he runs a dream den in the backyard of the company that sells the Somnacin brand); a bloody Japanese tourist, and Eames, whom he might trust to much.

He's doomed.

He plans for all eventualities, and if he flirts with Ariadne, it's more to distract her and himself from any entanglement. She's clearly smitten with Cobb. It's most definitely not because Eames and Saito have hit it off together.

His head is in the clouds (literally and metaphorically) the job is difficult like the Kobayashi Maru, and he leaves the airport in a taxi to get away from them all, without noticing where they're going, what they're doing and generally completely miserable.

He hates him.

* * *

 

He's staying in the Hilton, because they're discrete, it's pretty in an impersonal way, and he's too tired to remember other hotels with the same comforting bathrooms.

He showers, hangs his suit out for dry-cleaning (traveling makes them disgusting) and falls into bed.

All he can think about is Eames. Less than 24 hours ago he kissed a young, pretty girl.

And all he thinks about is the guy who called him darling, and that probably ironically. It was one of his first legal names after all.

Some time, it feels late, but that may be jet-lag, he starts stalking Eames. That isn't hard because Arthur did process most of his ID and he's still using the same phone: Eames is staying at Saito's hotel.

He almost cancels the whole attempt, but then doubts himself again, calls a cab and leaves before he changes his mind once more.

He walks into the lobby like he owns it, straight to the elevator.

He rides straight up, knocks at the penthouse suite.

Like he suspected, Saito opens the door. "Good evening," Arthur tells him. Saito lifts an eyebrow. There's no need to be hateful just because Eames likes him better. "Nothing's wrong. I'm - looking for Eames."

Saito quietly musters him up and down. Then he says calmly: "He's down in room 649." and "good luck." The relief he feels, that Eames isn't here, is obvious, but Saito doesn't move a muscle.

“Thanks,” he tells the other man, "Good night."

He hurries downstairs, except he doesn't take the stairs (doesn't even see where they are) 

It's in front of the door he looses his nerve. He stands there like the idiot he is, looking at the fake mahogany door and wonders what the fuck he's doing. Why the fuck–

Eames opens the door, phone on his ear and visibly annoyed. He's wearing jeans, a t-shirt - not mismatched, miscolored. 

"Oh," he says.

Arthur pulls himself together. "Good evening."

"Arthur," Eames says.

Got it in one, Arthur wants to say. Or: that's my name. Instead he smiles slightly awkward. It's embarrassing, but at least he doesn't shuffle his feet. What he doesn't do, is speaking - explaining, apologizing, whatever.

"Do you - Is there some... Did something happen?"

Arthur stalls. "You know– we've met almost fifteen years ago," he says finally. 

"Have you come to kill me?" Eames asks incredulously. "Arthur, I promise I'm never calling you Darling again."

Arthur, who definitely did not expect that, stands straighter and fixates his stare to Eames left eyebrow arching in the most peculiar bow.

"No," Arthur says. "But i still do not want to be called darling. Call it professional courtesy."

"Come in then, Spencer. Have a cuppa."

There's a split second where Arthur wants to turn around in a sulk, but true: no one calls Arthur by his original handle - maybe because he had been so young back then. It's weird. It doesn't feel like his name at all. (No - it had been Mal who introduced him: this is my darling, Arthur Darling - and even those stupid preps from arts had realized the error of calling him that. Mal hadn't stopped there; she said his real name and identity were more fake than his fake one, because it didn't start until his twelfth year on earth. Arthur Darling, son of Bonnie Darling, it was. Funny, Eames would remember that.)

Eames stared at him kind of funny - and Arthur realized he had spaced out. He must be very tired.

"I'm tired," he tells Eames.

They're standing in the hotel room next to each other. Arthur does feel very tired. He wants to lay his head on Eames' shoulder, wants to hug his long-time colleague - scratch that, cuddle him like there's no tomorrow.

Eames watches him warily, one eyebrow so far up, it almost touches his hairline (Arthur watches it fascinated. His hair is wet, and almost hangs into his eyes.) "And you didn't go into one of those fancy hotel suites you prefer to sleep? Arthur, I feel so special."

"Eames," Arthur says, exhausted. 

"Arthur?" Eames swallows. "Are you..." He clears his throat. He somehow seems nearer, in the narrow hallway of the hotel room. "I'm going to-"

Arthur stealthily creeps forward - then, because his occupation isn't really helpful to keeping stable relationships - he presses his lips to Eames slightly open ones. (Eames was saying something, but Arthur hadn't listened, couldn't keep track of–)

It's a quick press of lips, a small kiss, nothing to write home about, and definitely not one of the greatest kisses in the history of kissing, but Arthur's nerves are shot and he's trembling (but that may as well be sleep deprivation)

"Arthur?" Eames repeats, but this time, it's more of a croak. "Is this some sort of revenge, because I called you darling?"

Arthur shuffles back a bit, so that he can comfortably give Eames a Look. It says: Are you stupid? Never mind. I like you anyways. It conveys exasperation, fondness - Arthur smiles. He really is tired. He's being poetic about looks.

"I'm taking your bed," he tells Eames. "The last sixteen hours of sleep were exhausting."

The forger stands there, a bit lost, while Arthur fishes a blanket out of the cupboard and makes himself comfortable on the queen sized bed.

"I still feel kind of cold," he prompts the other subtly.

When Eames finally wraps his arms around him, there's no suppressing the sappiness of it all. And Arthur doesn't want to anyway.

 

It's a few days later, Cobb is on the phone. "Listen, Arthur, I know... The past year hasn't been easy - and , well, I apologize..."

Eames snickers and Arthur swats his hands away.

There's a pause on the other side and then Cobb says: "Arthur, are you sleeping with someone!"

Eames grins boyishly and Arthur can't help smiling, too. "Do you really want to know?"

Cobb splutters. "You're- that's- never mind. I'll call again."

Two minutes later, it's Eames phone. “Eames. I just wanted – Is that Arthur?! Goddammit!" Eames can hear how he steps away from the phone – does he think he's catching the gay? "Dammit, Arthur!You're scaring my virgin eyes!" There's a high-pitched chorus of "Goddammit" in the background. "Nevermind! I'm expecting you for Thanksgiving! Don't tell me anything ever!”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


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